A common mode of printing in a networked environment requires a user to select a preferred network printer to which a print request will be sent, often without knowledge of how many requests or pages may be positioned in a queue ahead of their request or whether resources may be needed at that particular printer. Such a situation can cause unnecessary delays and multiple requests for the same document, resulting in wasted resources, especially in networked environments where printers are located in another room or even on another floor from where the user is located.
A solution to this problem involves the implementation of a system in which a user can walk to any printer in the network pool and request that his or her job is released and printed at that particular printer. This ‘walk and request’ mode of printing is the basis of “Follow-Me Printing”, sometimes referred to as “Pull Printing”. Current technology enabling follow-me printing requires a customer to install additional applications and servers to track print jobs. Many users, however, are inconvenienced by having to provide additional hardware or pay maintenance costs for these solutions.
In addition, if a mixed fleet of printers is utilized, the follow-me print jobs may not print correctly if an incompatible printer driver was used to submit that print job to the pool (i.e., since printer drivers and printers are usually matched). This forces the user to select the correct driver when printing, but because the user may not know from which printer the job will be actually printed, the user will not have a way of knowing ahead of time which printer driver to select.
Based on the aforementioned limitations of the currently available follow-me printing technology, the inventor believes a need exists for an alternative, simpler, and inexpensive method and system that offer an improvement over currently available techniques and systems.